Friday, December 10, 2010

Penguinz, HedgeHog Launch, Sushi Cat, Zomgies. These are only a few of the independent games that feature the adorable, cartoony art of James Pearmain. Since he was 15 he started doing flash cartoons just for a laugh.
"I remember playing a side-scrolling shooting game called "WPNfire" and being amazed by how much fun a well polished Flash game could be!" James said in an interview. He started designing his own version of the game which would soon become Penguinz, and teamed up with a programmer (LongAnimals) on Newgrounds to make a game that really did well for itself. Penguinz went on to get over 10 million plays and really opened up James to a whole world of indie game design. "There was nothing stopping me!"

In the last year you've enjoyed huge success from Sushi Cat, Rescue on Cocoa Farm and Zomgies in the last year, what are your next big games and which are you most excited about?

I'm actually currently working on sequels to both Zomgies and Sushi Cat! The original Zomgies was a really quick 2 week project that turned out to be a cool idea that people liked, so this time around we're spending as long as we need to deliver an AWESOME experience! Similarly with Sushi Cat, we had a very tight deadline for the original games, and this time around we are going all out on it. I'm actually extremely excited with how its looking so far, and it will without a doubt be one of my most complete and well presented games. The game I am MOST excited about however is Penguinz 2. I've been planning the game since before the release of the original, but I wanted to wait until I was good enough to do the series justice, and have it blow everything else out the water. I'm beginning to get to a stage where I'm really happy with my artwork now, so I really can't wait to finally get stuck into that.

A shot of Zomgies in action!

Do you have any of these games planned for release on the iPad, like you did with Hedgehog launch?
One of the great things about working with Armor Games is that they do a lot of iPhone conversions and support their games for a long time after release. There are no concrete plans that I'm aware of, but I'm sure you will see an iPhone version of Sushi Cat 2 and some of our other projects in the future.

Sushi cat, a most bizarre, yet adorable game!

Do you feel apple is right about flash, and that it will soon be replaced by better technologies like Unity and HTML5?
I think Unity is an amazing piece of software, but I'm not sure it will replace Flash. I don't have any experience with the platform, but it seems like developing a good Unity game takes a lot of work, and unless we see a shift towards commercialization in the browser games industry, I can't see it becoming more popular with developers. As for HTML5 it will likely replace Flash for the use of video, but as a game platform it just doesn't feel fast enough to me!